Sexual abstinence, carried to its (il)logical extreme

Yes, it’s true: your money is being spent to tell schoolchildren that no one should engage in any activity leading to “sexual stimulation” except within a monogamous heterosexual marriage; in fact, it can’t be spent on telling them anything else, according the funding guidelines issued by the Department of Health and Human Services. “Sexual stimulation” doesn’t seem to be defined in the regulations, though it’s explicitly not limited to “genital contact”; read literally, it would apply to dancing, kissing, hugging, and even holding hands. (Authorities differ on whether foot massage constitutes “sexual stimulation.”)

As Amy Bryant points out on the Planned Parenthood website, this message has the clear implication that non-heterosexuals should never engage in “sexual stimulation” with anyone, ever. Of course, that’s always been the logical implication of the combination of “no sex before marriage” and “no gay marriage,” though the somewhat expansive definition of “sexual activity in the new regs does seem to break new ground. (I’ve remarked before on the astonishing capacity of the current ruling clique to assert the major and minor premises of a syllogism without asserting the conclusion.)

In addition, the regs forbid children to be taught anything useful about contraceptives and requires that they be taught about contraceptive failure rates and side-effects. The result, according to the published evaluations of such programs: slight delay in the age of first intercourse, and increased risk of pregnancy and STDs.

It seems to me that a classic bait-and-switch has gone on here. The federal government has devoted more than a billion dollars to “abstinence-only” education programs in schools. These programs have commanded fairly broad public support or at least tolerance, I think, because people who disagree on many other things will often agree that youngsters are better off postponing sexual experience until they are old enough to handle the consequences. Now it turns out that the message wasn’t “teens are better off if they wait” but “let’s reverse the sexual revolution.”

Actually, on the age point I have a tiny bit of sympathy with the people writing the regs. If your intention is to get teens to wait, telling them “Sex is for grown-ups” might well prove counterproductive, by reinforcing the connection between sexual experience and adult status. After all, the only thing the average teenager wants more than his/her significant other’s body is to be a grown-up.

I say “a tiny amount” of sympathy because I have a strong, principled objection to lying to schoolchildren, and the claim that the currently operative social norm, outside a few religious minorities, is “no ‘sexual stimulation’ before marriage,” is false-to-fact.

The anti-contraceptive propaganda lacks even that thin justification. Of course this crowd doesn’t want to tell the truth about contraception, but the obvious alternative is to say nothing.

Politically, this may be a bridge too far for the fundamentalist anti-sex league. If I were a Democratic candidate in a swing district, I don’t think I’d make this an issue; but if I were in the party-building business, I’d try to make sure that every potential voter under 30 heard about and was laughing at it. Not having done the polling, I don’t want to be dogmatic, but I’d bet this would play very poorly indeed among the Gen X/Gen Y crowd. Don’t bother discussing it seriously; just make fun of the fact that Republicans don’t anyone to get any.

Footnote The regs seem to have been issued more or less stealthily, rather than being trumpeted; they came out in January, and we’re just hearing about them now, from a source opposed to them. That says something about what the Bushies think about the appeal of this sort of thing outside the theocrat wing of their base, as well as something about the dependency of the professional news media on press releases.

Special note to my Republican friends and readers If you don’t want the whole country laughing at Republican jokes, try changing your party’s leadership. When that doesn’t work, change parties yourself, and help us change our party’s leadership.